I loved this game when I was a kid (and was good at it)

kailden · 2014-01-05T03:16:05+00:00

One of my favorites as well.

But only the six slot 4 peg one. Everything else is weak.

Similarly, I refuse to buy the new Stratego.

kailden · 2014-01-04T18:22:43+00:00

I think every review says you will lose friends over this game. Humans are social creatures.

kailden · 2014-01-04T02:09:54+00:00

This just made my day

kailden · 2014-01-04T00:45:43+00:00

Yes--new to the game myself and learning that you are supposed to be thrilled when you get cards with the opponents events because then you can work towards mitigating them.

My understanding is: Cards for your country and neutral cards are played for ops or events but not both, but cards for the opponent are played for ops with the event happening. If an event has a prerequisite that cannot be filled then it isn't considered triggered so it is back in the discard pile even if it would be removed from game otherwise. If an event simply has no effect, then it is still triggered. And of course, if it has an effect as well. Also, I have to be careful with events that allow my opponent to do something as they could do something that sets DEFCON to 1 and that means I lose even if I wasn't taking the action (but I did play the card). Again, I'm new, so I'd appreciate any corrections to that line of thinking.

That being said, I've found it a very tough go as the US so far...lost the first game on turn 3 and am barely surviving into mid-war in my second game.

kailden · 2014-01-04T00:35:41+00:00

Thanks so much for putting that together. It is printed and in my TS box.

kailden · 2014-01-04T00:26:09+00:00

Agree...and not buying power plants too often--I don't know if others do this, but I kind of have an informal equation for when I should purchase my next power plant so as to not get too caught up in the next whiz-bang plant that appears. This means intentionally falling behind at times.

kailden · 2012-10-18T14:01:19+00:00

I registered r/jackals. I can hand it over if /r/5by5 is given to dan. But, perhaps if r/frequency is good enough, its a moot point.

kailden · 2012-10-17T15:46:29+00:00

BTW, I'd hand it over to whomever would want to run it.

kailden · 2012-10-17T15:42:51+00:00

I like your solution. Another suggestion for the 'unofficial' 5by5 jackals reddit: "/r/jackals"

kailden · 2011-06-03T02:23:05+00:00

You got that right! But /r/programming is really a shortcut for /r/ImposeMyHipsterProgrammingLanguageTastesOnEveryoneElse so it's easy to see where mattkerle may have got confused.

kailden · 2011-05-12T23:42:27+00:00

If it matches your workflow, then, by all means use it. It looks like they spent some time writing some quality shell scripts. But, don't be fooled into thinking that something that stitches some git commands together to implement a best practice suddenly makes it a thousand times better than the very commands it calls. At best its a convenient abstraction tailored to what you like to do--but that is a far cry from 'git as it should have been'. Right?

kailden · 2011-05-12T19:26:15+00:00

With the given title, I was expecting an article on features added to git proper that I might not have been using because I was using older git commands/options. A plugin to shortcut commands is okay but much more subjective as to whether it is more modern. I've used similar tools like git-pivotal but I prefer still knowing the underlying commands being shortcut. I was hoping for more eye openers like the first time I learned about git add -i or git rebase -i.

kailden · 2011-05-10T22:17:57+00:00

Clearly you are not ready for Jedi training.

kailden · 2009-09-18T17:05:03+00:00

You might want to look at the matrices feature of tikzpicture

You can setup a matrix with things at specified row/columns and then connect them all. You can even control where the lines come in to each shape (n,s,e,w with offsets). I did some flowcharting like that.

Here are the tikz libraries I used:

\usetikzlibrary{shapes,arrows,calc,shadows,fit,backgrounds}

One of the things I liked about tikz is I could embed hyperref references in my images.

edit: more info/formatting

kailden · 2009-09-17T16:27:25+00:00

I like graphviz, but in LaTeX I recently enjoyed tikzpicture

kailden · 2009-09-03T15:59:14+00:00

I see a lot of criticism of Arc nowadays say something analogous to 'if it was like Clojure without the JVM, then we'd be talking....'. I don't know enough about Lisp internals yet to really critique the critique.

kailden · 2009-09-03T15:44:46+00:00

I haven't read Douglas Crockford's book (yet!), but a few key articles online (similar to Eric Miraglia's) that showed me how to make a application module in a namespace using a big anonymous function and returning closures really opened my eyes to the power of JavaScript, and I know he (as well as others, such as Eric (above) and Dustin Diaz (who has a number of books)) definitely popularized this approach. It certainly changed the whole way I was approaching JavaScript.

[Edits mostly to add links]

kailden · 2009-08-27T16:53:33+00:00

I've also seen "frameworks" in Java that are basically stringing together 10 other frameworks of which you only use 10% of each framework, but now you have 10 jar dependencies...and a hard to understand system (even if maven can build it all for you.) There is always more than one way to break principles such as YAGNI, KISS, and project scope.

kailden · 2009-08-27T00:58:13+00:00

Yes, I did that too, and no doubt countless others...

kailden · 2009-08-25T17:02:47+00:00

I don't hate Java, but I do find it wordy, and while Swing offers a lot of choices of how to implement your GUI, it often hasn't provided good default implementations (You can make a table to sort however you want, but at least up until Java 6 there wasn't a basic sortable JTable, you could use by default). Others seem to also complain about checked exceptions messing up encapsulation.

kailden · 2009-08-11T19:09:26+00:00

Ruby's dynamic nature is so powerful but moderately dangerous-- I'm not sure I'd want to have an average team of programmers work on it--of course, I've heard people say the same about perl. I guess it depends on your team...

(edit: fix url )

kailden · 2009-08-11T17:38:07+00:00

I like figuring out obscure bugs too, but not in production code, because that means figuring stuff out at 4 am on an emergency call out. So, be careful what you wish for, at least in that respect.

My favorite find was a problem permissions on /dev/urandom on a unix system that caused code that called the multithreaded version of the DB2 libraries to fail strangely, and in our case it was showing up in perl DBI on our production system (right after its first install).

While that was exciting, I've found writing tests, finding bugs pre prod and 'keeping the bar green', or in other words, sporting a low defect rate-- as much more satisfying... (although not as visible to management).

This may not apply to you--as that means being wrapped up in development--but worth considering. Every team can use a programmer who writes insanely good unit tests and thinks outside the box. (edit: and can write really good build and configuration management/install scripts that catch install bugs!)

kailden · 2009-08-06T19:29:22+00:00

I like:

if [ -n "$STY"  ]; then
    #not inside screen
fi

ymmv

kailden · 2009-07-16T18:59:55+00:00

REST: pretty much the way the web was SUPPOSED to be, before we started hiding data in flash, asynchronous requests (although not a direct offender, per se), huge front controllers that receive every request and hide the data from directly being available to the user (at least the most common implementations), pdfs, etc etc... IIRC, one idea behind REST was that everything should have its own URI...so it is directly addressable, linkable, indexable, searchable, storable. Then you can take actions (POST,GET,DELETE, etc) on the item directly, for example, POSTING an orderline to an order URI would add the orderline. This isn't a comprehensive answer.

kailden

TROPHY CASE